I would highly recommend trying out Identicons, which are a cool math-based image idea created by Don Park that’s unique to the commenter, so even if someone doesn’t have an avatar yet they have a consistent (and handsome) image next to their name when they comment.

We’re probably going to make Identicons the default for the dashboard instead of the mystery man, we just need to make a few tweaks to Gravatar infrastructure first. (The generated avatars are CPU-intensive to create, and it’s Sunday, a day of rest for the busy Gravatar servers.)

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317 Comments

The options are very cool. I’ll be interested to see what the generated logos look like. Never liked the mystery man, particularly since 56% of bloggers are women. (No idea if that’s true, I just made it up.) Will generated image users now be eligible for front page/news departments inclusion? Thanks, all.

I always feel glad to see developments at WordPress. You guys are nice people from whom every one gets admiration. Thank you for this wonderful Identicon. WordPress deserve to come right on the top. Thank you

I love the new gravatar options, just wish my theme had integrated the code… no big deal, just added a great avatar plugin and works great. You can really see the improvement on the wordpress based blogs (wordpress hosted blogs).

Thanks, this is a great feature. I’ve been doing it manually by replacing the email address; it’s certainly a lot less work! Is there any way it could be tweaked to set a different avatar for the comments in Akismet? I almost approved a spam comment because of it.

Thanks again, Matt, for all of the hard work, and for keeping things fun. Most comments coming to my blog are currently “identicon-less” (or from “Mystery Man”), so I’ll see if I notice any difference. Looks like the settings will be good to experiment with, though, just to see what shows up!

Great idea! After being surprised by a few not-too-family-friendly comment avatars on my blog, I had hoped there would be a solution for filtering them somewhat without deleting the comment, itself. Thanks for the new addition!

I guess the icons are showing up on the individual blog posts, but they aren’t showing up on the front page next to individual’s names. It would be helpful if the icons could also show up on the front page of the blog so they may be enticing for people to click and read.

Any chance of having ravatars included in the admin panel? I think its a nice addition since it allows greater customization of icons by the blog owner while still showing unique avatars for all the commenters (but then again I wrote the plugin so I’m biased.)

I had been debating about the best way to handle the admin screens when upgrading the plugin for 2.5 until I saw this post. It seems pretty obvious that having it included alongside the other options would make the most sense. Anyway if anyone out there is interested, let me know and I can help out with the integration.